Golden Boys

Those were the days. 50 years ago football was a different game. Actually, only the sums involved need to be increased...

80,000 POUNDS is an awful lot of money. We may think that the Milan Football Club, who paid that amount to Chelsea for Jimmy Greaves, have a millionaire somewhere behind them.

They have. So have Juventus, Naples and other Italian clubs. This is why they can afford such enormous wage bills, and can offer irresistible financial bait to British footballers.

Greaves put it on record that he did not want to leave England, but Milan were offering him such a high signing-on fee that he really had no choice in the matter.

Helpless, the English fans moan as their golden boys take off for sunnier lands. They blame the clubs, the Football League, the Italians, for being a lot of poachers.

But the millions who weekly cheer their favourite club, support, almost to a man, the social system in which whoever pays the most money takes the best choice. They can hardly complain when that principle is extended to football.

Because, whatever the match programme may say, football is not a sport. When we hear it discussed in terms of transfer fees, gate money and the rest, we know that it is as much a business as any gas works or marmalade factory.

(Socialist Standard, June 1961)